This Title Will Include No Puns on Sucking
Jarhead (2005, d. Sam Mendes, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx). Jarhead is a document of the same kind of soldier in a new kind of war. The movie is infused with images from other war films (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, and most notably Full Metal Jacket), which has led to more than a few reviews that suggest that Jarhead is ripping off these films...espeically Full Metal Jacket.
Most reviews have made much of the fact that Jarhead features homages/ripoffs of these earlier films, with the exception that nothing actually happens in Jarhead...there are no battle scenes. Even the movie calls its shot, so to speak. As the Marines finally cross the border into Iraq and prepare for action, Sarsgaard watches the planes flying overhead. He comments on the fact that this is a new war, and that it is outrunning them. Meanwhile, the men are trapped in talking about war in its old form, and via the popular media experiences that guided them to it in the first place.
Movies, particularly the Vietnam movies (at least currently), have created our sense of what war is, and how much the new media access to war is tearing those myths down. In a sense, Jarhead poses a variation on the guiding question from High Fidelity--did love create pop music, or was it the other way around?
For Jarhead, the answer is both. Jarhead talks about how these men, particularly Gyllenhaal and Sarsgaard's characters, are extremely ordinary men with no real prospects, who have come to war in search of personal meaning on this visceral level. They are looking for the mythic power of the movies in their lives, almost like a life and death version of the NBA. Watch the almost desperate look in their eyes as they celebrate the Ride of the Valkyries scene in Apocalypse Now.
The desperation in the Marines' eyes in that scene mirrors the later desperation we see in Gyllenhaal's eyes when watching a surprise porn film, only the second time, it's tempered with a new sense of reality and sadness because there is actual loss--of relationships, and the last remaining vestiges of fantasies about what the war would contribute to a sense of meaning and self. As the boredom sets in, as the realization that they may never see the action they seek, that they may never confront death and defeat it, that they may never be heroes, the men begin to fall apart.
That said, the movie itself is only very good, not great. It is limned with a certain artifice, much like this sentence. Except for Swofford's name, all the characters are more types than people, and I can't be bothered to look up their names on imdb. Also, as my friend Jon put it, the movie goes on for exactly five minutes too long. Finally, the film is art directed to within an inch of its life, which takes away some of the urgency of the movie. Still, I think Jarhead represents a shift in the war movie; as we are exposed to actual footage (well, "actual" edited footage) on CNN and Fox News, and documentaries like Gunner Palace, we too are coming to terms with a different kind of war movie, rooted with one foot in the mythologies of Band of Brothers and the Vietnam movies, and the other in the down and dirty disappointments of what it truly means to go to war--boredom, spiked with intermittent moments of sheer unfettered terror.
Kinda like life.
Next Time: Honey
Most reviews have made much of the fact that Jarhead features homages/ripoffs of these earlier films, with the exception that nothing actually happens in Jarhead...there are no battle scenes. Even the movie calls its shot, so to speak. As the Marines finally cross the border into Iraq and prepare for action, Sarsgaard watches the planes flying overhead. He comments on the fact that this is a new war, and that it is outrunning them. Meanwhile, the men are trapped in talking about war in its old form, and via the popular media experiences that guided them to it in the first place.
Movies, particularly the Vietnam movies (at least currently), have created our sense of what war is, and how much the new media access to war is tearing those myths down. In a sense, Jarhead poses a variation on the guiding question from High Fidelity--did love create pop music, or was it the other way around?
For Jarhead, the answer is both. Jarhead talks about how these men, particularly Gyllenhaal and Sarsgaard's characters, are extremely ordinary men with no real prospects, who have come to war in search of personal meaning on this visceral level. They are looking for the mythic power of the movies in their lives, almost like a life and death version of the NBA. Watch the almost desperate look in their eyes as they celebrate the Ride of the Valkyries scene in Apocalypse Now.
The desperation in the Marines' eyes in that scene mirrors the later desperation we see in Gyllenhaal's eyes when watching a surprise porn film, only the second time, it's tempered with a new sense of reality and sadness because there is actual loss--of relationships, and the last remaining vestiges of fantasies about what the war would contribute to a sense of meaning and self. As the boredom sets in, as the realization that they may never see the action they seek, that they may never confront death and defeat it, that they may never be heroes, the men begin to fall apart.
That said, the movie itself is only very good, not great. It is limned with a certain artifice, much like this sentence. Except for Swofford's name, all the characters are more types than people, and I can't be bothered to look up their names on imdb. Also, as my friend Jon put it, the movie goes on for exactly five minutes too long. Finally, the film is art directed to within an inch of its life, which takes away some of the urgency of the movie. Still, I think Jarhead represents a shift in the war movie; as we are exposed to actual footage (well, "actual" edited footage) on CNN and Fox News, and documentaries like Gunner Palace, we too are coming to terms with a different kind of war movie, rooted with one foot in the mythologies of Band of Brothers and the Vietnam movies, and the other in the down and dirty disappointments of what it truly means to go to war--boredom, spiked with intermittent moments of sheer unfettered terror.
Kinda like life.
Next Time: Honey
posted by Jamie at 8:55 PM
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